Don't Let Social Data Rain On Your Parade

“Hey Smitty, I got this guy’s email address. Can you do some digging and tell me more about ‘em? How much does he make? What are his hobbies? Oh, and I want to see pictures of his pet dog too. Can you do it?”

“Yea boss, I’ll get you your information, buckets full of it. I’ll make it rain!”

This is the imaginary old timey gangster context I imagine around the idea behind Rainmaker, its contacts service and Rainmaker API.

One of 13 identity APIs in our directory, Rainmaker is possibly the most simple and powerful. Just make an HTTP request which includes the target email address and your API key and boom, the thunder starts and the rain of social data begins.

Rainmaker pulls together all that information that you thought was spread around through different social networking sites and puts it all in one place. The concept is that you start with a Google contact and pay “the rainmaker” to “make it rain” on the contact. When extra information is found on this contact, it costs you one raindrop credit and credits are sold in monthly plans, similar to cell phone plans in the US.

Rainmaker is a RESTful API returning results in both JSON and XML formats. The API is currently in beta and is available for use through application only. It is being offered by CloudCenter LLC , who aims to “to enable small and medium businesses to work in the cloud.”

[...] WeÃ¢â¬â¢ve all heard it before.ÃÂ Be careful what you do on social networks because your employer, teacher, business partner or spiritual guru might find out about it.ÃÂ Well now they wonÃ¢â¬â¢t just find out about it, theyÃ¢â¬â¢ll ask you to please allow Reppify to access your social network information so that you can be evaluated.ÃÂ Reppify will create a report on you, based on your social network activity, and sum it all up in a numerical ranking.ÃÂ The Reppify API will allow this technology to be integrated into other social network monitoring services like RainMaker. [...]